The First Key Evaluation In NLHE Ring Games
Carl Sampson | November 2, 2011
When you sit down to play in any NLHE ring game, you must know where your profit potential will come from. If you do not know this, you are committing the biggest sin in poker: guessing. As the great Amarillo “Slim” Preston once said, “Guessing is for losers.” If you sit down in a poker game hoping that playing your hands well will make you money, you are guessing that this process alone will be enough.
I coach players, and one of their biggest mistakes is entering a game without a discernible plan to make money. Let’s look at a few basic concepts in how the average poker player enters a game. The typical rock will sit, play solid poker, wait for good hands, try small steal attempts, not get out of line, and hope for big implied odds and big pay-offs on their monsters.
This is a good way of playing, but only if the environment supports this strategy. If this rock has used this style of play in the past and made money, he will likely continue with that style. So he sits down as usual in a full ring game and waits for some fish to pass him 100bb in a situation where he is either a lock or massively +EV. The problem arises when too many other players at his table are doing the same thing.
Guessing is for losers.
Amarillo Preston
It is often very difficult to see the EV of a certain strategy in a short time frame. Players tend to focus on equity in certain hands and situations. They often fail to look at equity in their overall strategy, which is more difficult to ascertain. If you are sitting in a game with too many players who have short stacks, your 100bb becomes far less effective as a playable stack.
The EV you have against good short stack players and good deep stack players is minimal. Knowing where your likely profits are coming from impacts other areas, like game selection. If you want to make your poker career a success, you need to design strategies for different opponents with different stack sizes and skill levels. This is a mistake I made early in my NLHE career and paid the price when online games became tougher.
Online poker has a constantly shifting dynamic, making it very difficult for novice and intermediate players to succeed over the long term. The best strategies are not fixed, like some card-dependent strategies, but highly fluid systems that don’t resemble systematic play at all.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Carl “The Dean” Sampson is an online poker pro, coach and poker writer with many years experience in the poker and gambling industry. Carl has three published books and has written for many leading poker magazines like the WPT and Poker Pro Europe.
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